Books: Nomads Of The North
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James Oliver Curwood >> Nomads Of The North
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14 NOMADS OF THE NORTH
A STORY OF ROMANCE AND ADVENTURE UNDER THE OPEN STARS
BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
CHAPTER ONE
It was late in the month of March, at the dying-out of the Eagle
Moon, that Neewa the black bear cub got his first real look at the
world. Noozak, his mother, was an old bear, and like an old person
she was filled with rheumatics and the desire to sleep late. So
instead of taking a short and ordinary nap of three months this
particular winter of little Neewa's birth she slept four, which,
made Neewa, who was born while ms mother was sound asleep, a
little over two months old instead of six weeks when they came out
of den.
In choosing this den Noozak had gone to a cavern at the crest of a
high, barren ridge, and from this point Neewa first looked down
into the valley. For a time, coming out of darkness into sunlight,
he was blinded. He could hear and smell and feel many things
before he could see. And Noozak, as though puzzled at finding
warmth and sunshine in place of cold and darkness, stood for many
minutes sniffing the wind and looking down upon her domain.
For two weeks an early spring had been working its miracle of
change in that wonderful country of the northland between
Jackson's Knee and the Shamattawa River, and from north to south
between God's Lake and the Churchill.
It was a splendid world. From the tall pinnacle of rock on which
they stood it looked like a great sea of sunlight, with only here
and there patches of white snow where the winter winds had piled
it deep. Their ridge rose up out of a great valley. On all sides
of them, as far as a man's eye could have reached, there were blue
and black patches of forest, the shimmer of lakes still partly
frozen, the sunlit sparkle of rivulet and stream, and the greening
open spaces out of which rose the perfumes of the earth. These
smells drifted up like tonic and food to the nostrils of Noozak
the big bear. Down there the earth was already swelling with life.
The buds on the poplars were growing fat and near the bursting
point; the grasses were sending out shoots tender and sweet; the
camas were filling with juice; the shooting stars, the dog-tooth
violets, and the spring beauties were thrusting themselves up into
the warm glow of the sun, inviting Noozak and Neewa to the feast.
All these things Noozak smelled with the experience and the
knowledge of twenty years of life behind her--the delicious aroma
of the spruce and the jackpine; the dank, sweet scent of water-
lily roots and swelling bulbs that came from a thawed-out fen at
the foot of the ridge; and over all these things, overwhelming
their individual sweetnesses in a still greater thrill of life,
the smell of the heart itself!
And Neewa smelled them. His amazed little body trembled and
thrilled for the first time with the excitement of life. A moment
before in darkness, he found himself now in a wonderland of which
he had never so much as had a dream. In these few minutes Nature
was at work upon him. He possessed no knowledge, but instinct was
born within him. He knew this was HIS world, that the sun and the
warmth were for him, and that the sweet things of the earth were
inviting him into his heritage. He puckered up his little brown
nose and sniffed the air, and the pungency of everything that was
sweet and to be yearned for came to him.
And he listened. His pointed ears were pricked forward, and up to
him came the drone of a wakening earth. Even the roots of the
grasses must have been singing in their joy, for all through that
sunlit valley there was the low and murmuring music of a country
that was at peace because it was empty of men. Everywhere was the
rippling sound of running water, and he heard strange sounds that
he knew was life; the twittering of a rock-sparrow, the silver-
toned aria of a black-throated thrush down in the fen, the shrill
paean of a gorgeously coloured Canada jay exploring for a nesting
place in a brake of velvety balsam. And then, far over his head, a
screaming cry that made him shiver. It was instinct again that
told him in that cry was danger. Noozak looked up, and saw the
shadow of Upisk, the great eagle, as it flung itself between the
sun and the earth. Neewa saw the shadow, and cringed nearer to his
mother.
And Noozak--so old that she had lost half her teeth, so old that
her bones ached on damp and chilly nights, and her eyesight was
growing dim--was still not so old that she did not look down with
growing exultation upon what she saw. Her mind was travelling
beyond the mere valley in which they had wakened. Off there beyond
the walls of forest, beyond the farthest lake, beyond the river
and the plain, were the illimitable spaces which gave her home. To
her came dully a sound uncaught by Neewa--the almost
unintelligible rumble of the great waterfall. It was this, and the
murmur of a thousand trickles of running water, and the soft wind
breathing down in the balsam and spruce that put the music of
spring into the air.
At last Noozak heaved a great breath out of her lungs and with a
grunt to Neewa began to lead the way slowly down among the rocks
to the foot of the ridge.
In the golden pool of the valley it was even warmer than on the
crest of the ridge. Noozak went straight to the edge of the
slough. Half a dozen rice birds rose with a whir of wings that
made Neewa almost upset himself. Noozak paid no attention to them.
A loon let out a squawky protest at Noozak's soft-footed
appearance, and followed it up with a raucous screech that raised
the hair on Neewa's spine. And Noozak paid no attention to this.
Neewa observed these things. His eye was on her, and instinct had
already winged his legs with the readiness to run if his mother
should give the signal. In his funny little head it was developing
very quickly that his mother was a most wonderful creature. She
was by all odds the biggest thing alive--that is, the biggest that
stood on legs, and moved. He was confident of this for a space of
perhaps two minutes, when they came to the end of the fen. And
here was a sudden snort, a crashing of bracken, the floundering of
a huge body through knee-deep mud, and a monstrous bull moose,
four times as big as Noozak, set off in lively flight. Neewa's
eyes all but popped from his head. And STILL Noozak PAID NO
ATTENTION!
It was then that Neewa crinkled up his tiny nose and snarled, just
as he had snarled at Noozak's ears and hair and at sticks he had
worried in the black cavern. A glorious understanding dawned upon
him. He could snarl at anything he wanted to snarl at, no matter
how big. For everything ran away from Noozak his mother.
All through this first glorious day Neewa was discovering things,
and with each hour it was more and more impressed upon him that
his mother was the unchallenged mistress of all this new and
sunlit domain.
Noozak was a thoughtful old mother of a bear who had reared
fifteen or eighteen families in her time, and she travelled very
little this first day in order that Neewa's tender feet might
toughen up a bit. They scarcely left the fen, except to go into a
nearby clump of trees where Noozak used her claws to shred a
spruce that they might get at the juice and slimy substance just
under the bark. Neewa liked this dessert after their feast of
roots and bulbs, and tried to claw open a tree on his own account.
By mid-afternoon Noozak had eaten until her sides bulged out, and
Neewa himself--between his mother's milk and the many odds and
ends of other things--looked like an over-filled pod. Selecting a
spot where the declining sun made a warm oven of a great white
rock, lazy old Noozak lay down for a nap, while Neewa, wandering
about in quest of an adventure of his own, came face to face with
a ferocious bug.
The creature was a giant wood-beetle two inches long. Its two
battling pincers were jet black, and curved like hooks of iron. It
was a rich brown in colour and in the sunlight its metallic armour
shone in a dazzling splendour. Neewa, squatted flat on his belly,
eyed it with a swiftly beating heart. The beetle was not more than
a foot away, and ADVANCING! That was the curious and rather
shocking part of it. It was the first living thing he had met with
that day that had not run away. As it advanced slowly on its two
rows of legs the beetle made a clicking sound that Neewa heard
quite distinctly. With the fighting blood of his father,
Soominitik, nerving him on to the adventure he thrust out a
hesitating paw, and instantly Chegawasse, the beetle, took upon
himself a most ferocious aspect. His wings began humming like a
buzz-saw, his pincers opened until they could have taken in a
man's finger, and he vibrated on his legs until it looked as
though he might be performing some sort of a dance. Neewa jerked
his paw back and after a moment or two Chegawasse calmed himself
and again began to ADVANCE!
Neewa did not know, of course, that the beetle's field of vision
ended about four inches from the end of his nose; the situation,
consequently, was appalling. But it was never born in a son of a
father like Soominitik to run from a bug, even at nine weeks of
age. Desperately he thrust out his paw again, and unfortunately
for him one of his tiny claws got a half Nelson on the beetle and
held Chegawasse on his shining back so that he could neither buzz
not click. A great exultation swept through Neewa. Inch by inch he
drew his paw in until the beetle was within reach of his sharp
little teeth. Then he smelled of him.
That was Chegawasse's opportunity. The pincers closed and Noozak's
slumbers were disturbed by a sudden bawl of agony. When she raised
her head Neewa was rolling about as if in a fit. He was scratching
and snarling and spitting. Noozak eyed him speculatively for some
moments, then reared herself slowly and went to him. With one big
paw she rolled him over--and saw Chegawasse firmly and
determinedly attached to her offspring's nose. Flattening Neewa on
his back so that he could not move she seized the beetle between
her teeth, bit slowly until Chegawasse lost his hold, and then
swallowed him.
From then until dusk Neewa nursed his sore nose. A little before
dark Noozak curled herself up against the big rock, and Neewa took
his supper. Then he made himself a nest in the crook of her big,
warm forearm. In spite of his smarting nose he was a happy bear,
and at the end of his first day he felt very brave and very
fearless, though he was but nine weeks old. He had come into the
world, he had looked upon many things, and if he had not conquered
he at least had gone gloriously through the day.
CHAPTER TWO
That night Neewa had a hard attack of Mistu-puyew, or stomach-
ache. Imagine a nursing baby going direct from its mother's breast
to a beefsteak! That was what Neewa had done. Ordinarily he would
not have begun nibbling at solid foods for at least another month,
but nature seemed deliberately at work in a process of intensive
education preparing him for the mighty and unequal struggle which
he would have to put up a little later. For hours Neewa moaned and
wailed, and Noozak muzzled his bulging little belly with her nose,
until finally he vomited and was better.
After that he slept. When he awoke he was startled by opening his
eyes full into the glare of a great blaze of fire. Yesterday he
had seen the sun, golden and shimmering and far away. But this was
the first time he had seen it come up over the edge of the world
on a spring morning in the Northland. It was as red as blood, and
as he stared it rose steadily and swiftly until the flat side of
it rounded out and it was a huge ball of SOMETHING. At first he
thought it was Life--some monstrous creature sailing up over the
forest toward them--and he turned with a whine of enquiry to his
mother. Whatever it was, Noozak was unafraid. Her big head was
turned toward it, and she was blinking her eyes in solemn comfort.
It was then that Neewa began to feel the pleasing warmth of the
red thing, and in spite of his nervousness he began to purr in the
glow of it. From red the sun turned swiftly to gold, and the whole
valley was transformed once more into a warm and pulsating glory
of life.
For two weeks after this first sunrise in Neewa's life Noozak
remained near the ridge and the slough. Then came the day, when
Neewa was eleven weeks old, that she turned her nose toward the
distant black forests and began the summer's peregrination.
Neewa's feet had lost their tenderness, and he weighed a good six
pounds. This was pretty good considering that he had only weighed
twelve ounces at birth.
From the day when Noozak set off on her wandering TREK Neewa's
real adventures began. In the dark and mysterious caverns of the
forests there were places where the snow still lay unsoftened by
the sun, and for two days Neewa yearned and whined for the sunlit
valley. They passed the waterfall, where Neewa looked for the
first tune on a rushing torrent of water. Deeper and darker and
gloomier grew the forest Noozak was penetrating. In this forest
Neewa received his first lessons in hunting. Noozak was now well
in the "bottoms" between the Jackson's Knee and Shamattawa
waterway divides, a great hunting ground for bears in the early
spring. When awake she was tireless in her quest for food, and was
constantly digging in the earth, or turning over stones and
tearing rotting logs and stumps into pieces. The little gray wood-
mice were her piece de resistance, small as they were, and it
amazed Neewa to see how quick his clumsy old mother could be when
one of these little creatures was revealed. There were times when
Noozak captured a whole family before they could escape. And to
these were added frogs and toads, still partly somnambulent; many
ants, curled up as if dead, in the heart of rotting logs; and
occasional bumble-bees, wasps, and hornets. Now and then Neewa
took a nibble at these things. On the third day Noozak uncovered a
solid mass of hibernating vinegar ants as large as a man's two
fists, and frozen solid. Neewa ate a quantity of these, and the
sweet, vinegary flavour of them was delicious to his palate.
As the days progressed, and living things began to crawl out from
under logs and rocks, Neewa discovered the thrill and excitement
of hunting on his own account. He encountered a second beetle, and
killed it. He killed his first wood-mouse. Swiftly there were
developing in him the instincts of Soominitik, his scrap-loving
old father, who lived three or four valleys to the north of their
own, and who never missed an opportunity to get into a fight. At
four months of age, which was late in May, Neewa was eating many
things that would have killed most cubs of his age, and there
wasn't a yellow streak in him from the tip of his saucy little
nose to the end of his stubby tail. He weighed nine pounds at this
date and was as black as a tar-baby.
It was early in June that the exciting event occurred which
brought about the beginning of the big change in Neewa's life, and
it was on a day so warm and mellow with sunshine that Noozak
started in right after dinner to take her afternoon nap. They were
out of the lower timber country now, and were in a valley through
which a shallow stream wriggled and twisted around white sand-bars
and between pebbly shores. Neewa was sleepless. He had less desire
than ever to waste a glorious afternoon in napping. With his
little round eyes he looked out on a wonderful world, and found it
calling to him. He looked at his mother, and whined. Experience
told him that she was dead to the world for hours to come, unless
he tickled her foot or nipped her ear, and then she would only
rouse herself enough to growl at him. He was tired of that. He
yearned for something more exciting, and with his mind suddenly
made up he set off in quest of adventure.
In that big world of green and golden colours he was a little
black ball nearly as wide as he was long. He went down to the
creek, and looked back. He could still see his mother. Then his
feet paddled in the soft white sand of a long bar that edged the
shore, and he forgot Noozak. He went to the end of the bar, and
turned up on the green shore where the young grass was like velvet
under his paws. Here he began turning over small stones for ants.
He chased a chipmunk that ran a close and furious race with him
for twenty seconds. A little later a huge snow-shoe rabbit got up
almost under his nose, and he chased that until in a dozen long
leaps Wapoos disappeared in a thicket. Neewa wrinkled up his nose
and emitted a squeaky snarl. Never had Soominitik's blood run so
riotously within him. He wanted to get hold of something. For the
first time in his life he was yearning for a scrap. He was like a
small boy who the day after Christmas has a pair of boxing gloves
and no opponent. He sat down and looked about him querulously,
still wrinkling his nose and snarling defiantly. He had the whole
world beaten. He knew that. Everything was afraid of his mother.
Everything was afraid of HIM. It was disgusting--this lack of
something alive for an ambitious young fellow to fight. After all,
the world was rather tame.
He set off at a new angle, came around the edge of a huge rock,
and suddenly stopped.
From behind the other end of the rock protruded a huge hind paw.
For a few moments Neewa sat still, eyeing it with a growing
anticipation. This time he would give his mother a nip that would
waken her for good! He would rouse her to the beauty and the
opportunities of this day if there was any rouse in him! So he
advanced slowly and cautiously, picked out a nice bare spot on the
paw, and sank his little teeth in it to the gums.
There followed a roar that shook the earth. Now it happened that
the paw did not belong to Noozak, but was the personal property of
Makoos, an old he-bear of unlovely disposition and malevolent
temper. But in him age had produced a grouchiness that was not at
all like the grandmotherly peculiarities of old Noozak. Makoos was
on his feet fairly before Neewa realized that he had made a
mistake. He was not only an old bear and a grouchy bear, but he
was also a hater of cubs. More than once in his day he had
committed the crime of cannibalism. He was what the Indian hunter
calls uchan--a bad bear, an eater of his own kind, and the instant
his enraged eyes caught sight of Neewa he let out another roar.
At that Neewa gathered his fat little legs under his belly and was
off like a shot. Never before in his life had he run as he ran
now. Instinct told him that at last he had met something which was
not afraid of him, and that he was in deadly peril. He made no
choice of direction, for now that he had made this mistake he had
no idea where he would find his mother. He could hear Makoos
coming after him, and as he ran he set up a bawling that was
filled with a wild and agonizing prayer for help. That cry reached
the faithful old Noozak. In an instant she was on her feet--and
just in time. Like a round black ball shot out of a gun Neewa sped
past the rock where she had been sleeping, and ten jumps behind
him came Makoos. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his mother,
but his momentum carried him past her. In that moment Noozak leapt
into action. As a football player makes a tackle she rushed out
just in time to catch old Makoos with all her weight full
broadside in the ribs, and the two old bears rolled over and over
in what to Neewa was an exciting and glorious mix-up.
He had stopped, and his eyes bulged out like shining little onions
as he took in the scene of battle. He had longed for a fight but
what he saw now fairly paralyzed him. The two bears were at it,
roaring and tearing each other's hides and throwing up showers of
gravel and earth in their deadly clinch. In this first round
Noozak had the best of it. She had butted the wind out of Makoos
in her first dynamic assault, and now with her dulled and broken
teeth at his throat she was lashing him with her sharp hind claws
until the blood streamed from the old barbarian's sides and he
bellowed like a choking bull. Neewa knew that it was his pursuer
who was getting the worst of it, and with a squeaky cry for his
mother to lambast the very devil out of Makoos he ran back to the
edge of the arena, his nose crinkled and his teeth gleaming in a
ferocious snarl. He danced about excitedly a dozen feet from the
fighters, Soominitik's blood filling him with a yearning for the
fray and yet he was afraid.
Then something happened that suddenly and totally upset the
maddening joy of his mother's triumph. Makoos, being a he-bear,
was of necessity skilled in fighting, and all at once he freed
himself from Noozak's jaws, wallowed her under him, and in turn
began ripping the hide off old Noozak's carcass in such quantities
that she let out an agonized bawling that turned Neewa's little
heart into stone.
It is a matter of most exciting conjecture what a small boy will
do when he sees his father getting licked. If there is an axe
handy he is liable to use it. The most cataclysmic catastrophe
that cam come into his is to have a father whom some other boy's
father has given a walloping. Next to being President of the
United States the average small boy treasures the desire to
possess a parent who can whip any other two-legged creature that
wears trousers. And there were a lot of human things about Neewa.
The louder his mother bawled the more distinctly he felt the shock
of his world falling about him. If Noozak had lost a part of her
strength in her old age her voice, at least, was still unimpaired,
and such a spasm of outcry as she emitted could have been heard at
least half a mile away.
Neewa could stand no more. Blind with rage, he darted in. It was
chance that closed his vicious little jaws on a toe that belonged
to Makoos, and his teeth sank into the flesh like two rows of
ivory needles. Makoos gave a tug, but Neewa held on, and bit
deeper. Then Makoos drew up his leg and sent it out like a
catapault, and in spite of his determination to hang on Neewa
found himself sailing wildly through the air. He landed against a
rock twenty feet from the fighters with a force that knocked the
wind out of him, and for a matter of eight or ten seconds after
that he wobbled dizzily in his efforts to stand up. Then his
vision and his senses returned and he gazed on a scene that
brought all the blood pounding back into his body again.
Makoos was no longer fighting, but was RUNNING AWAY--and there was
a decided limp in his gait!
Poor old Noozak was standing on her feet, facing the retreating
enemy. She was panting like a winded calf. Her jaws were agape.
Her tongue lolled out, and blood was dripping in little trickles
from her body to the ground. She had been thoroughly and
efficiently mauled. She was beyond the shadow of a doubt a whipped
bear. Yet in that glorious flight of the enemy Neewa saw nothing
of Noozak's defeat. Their enemy was RUNNING AWAY! Therefore, he
was whipped. And with excited little squeaks of joy Neewa ran to
his mother.
CHAPTER THREE
As they stood in the warm sunshine of this first day of June,
watching the last of Makoos as he fled across the creek bottom,
Neewa felt very much like an old and seasoned warrior instead of a
pot-bellied, round-faced cub of four months who weighed nine
pounds and not four hundred.
It was many minutes after Neewa had sunk his ferocious little
teeth deep into the tenderest part of the old he-bear's toe before
Noozak could get her wind sufficiently to grunt. Her sides were
pumping like a pair of bellows, and after Makoos had disappeared
beyond the creek Neewa sat down on his chubby bottom, perked his
funny ears forward, and eyed his mother with round and glistening
eyes that were filled with uneasy speculation. With a wheezing
groan Noozak turned and made her way slowly toward the big rock
alongside which she had been sleeping when Neewa's fearful cries
for help had awakened her. Every bone in her aged body seemed
broken or dislocated. She limped and sagged and moaned as she
walked, and behind her were left little red trails of blood in the
green grass. Makoos had given her a fine pummeling.
She lay down, gave a final groan, and looked at Neewa, as if to
say:
"If you hadn't gone off on some deviltry and upset that old
viper's temper this wouldn't have happened. And now--look at ME!"
A young bear would have rallied quickly from the effects of the
battle, but Noozak lay without moving all the rest of that
afternoon, and the night that followed. And that night was by all
odds the finest that Neewa had ever seen. Now that the nights were
warm, he had come to love the moon even more than the sun, for by
birth and instinct he was more a prowler in darkness than a hunter
of the day. The moon rose out of the east in a glory of golden
fire. The spruce and balsam forests stood out like islands in a
yellow sea of light, and the creek shimmered and quivered like a
living thing as it wound its way through the glowing valley. But
Neewa had learned his lesson, and though the moon and the stars
called to him he hung close to his mother, listening to the
carnival of night sound that came to him, but never moving away
from her side.
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